“If that means that you are going to send me away with a refusal, I have come to spare you the necessity,” Garnett answered.
Mr. Newell turned on him a glance of undisguised wonder, in which an undertone of disappointment might almost have been detected.
“Ah—they’ve got no use for me, after all?” he said ironically.
Garnett, in reply, related without comment his conversation with Hermione, and the message with which she had charged him. He remembered her words exactly and repeated them without modification, heedless of what they implied or revealed.
Mr. Newell listened with an immovable face, occasionally casting a crumb to his flock. When Garnett ended he asked: “Does her mother know of this?”
“Assuredly not!” cried Garnett with a movement of disgust.
“You must pardon me; but Mrs. Newell is a very ingenious woman.” Mr. Newell shook out his remaining crumbs and turned thoughtfully toward Garnett.
“You believe it’s quite clear to Hermione that these people will use my refusal as a pretext for backing out of the marriage?”
“Perfectly clear—she told me so herself.”
“Doesn’t she consider the young man rather chicken-hearted?”
“No; he has already put up a big fight for her, and you know the French look at these things differently. He’s only twenty-three and his marrying against his parents’ approval is in itself an act of heroism.”
“Yes; I believe they look at it that way,” Mr. Newell assented. He rose and picked up the half-smoked cigar which he had laid on the bench beside him.
“What do they wear at these French weddings, anyhow? A dress-suit, isn’t it?” he asked.
The question was such a surprise to Garnett that for the moment he could only stammer out—“You consent then? I may go and tell her?”
“You may tell my girl—yes.” He gave a vague laugh and added: “One way or another, my wife always gets what she wants.”
VII
MR. NEWELL’S consent brought with it no accompanying concessions. In the first flush of his success Garnett had pictured himself as bringing together the father and daughter, and hovering in an attitude of benediction over a family group in which Mrs. Newell did not very distinctly figure.
But Mr. Newell’s conditions were inflexible. He would “see the thing through” for his daughter’s sake; but he stipulated that in the meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then he begged to be left alone. To this decision he adhered immovably, and when Garnett conveyed it to Hermione she accepted it with a deep look of understanding. As for Mrs. Newell she was too much engrossed in the nuptial preparations to give her husband another thought. She had gained her point, she had disarmed her foes, and in the first flush of success she had no time to remember by what means her victory had been won. Even Garnett’s services received little recognition, unless he found them sufficiently compensated by the new look in Hermione’s eyes.
The principal figures in Mrs. Newell’s foreground were the Woolsey Hubbards and Baron Schenkelderff. With these she was in hourly consultation, and Mrs. Hubbard went about aureoled with the importance of her close connection with an “aristocratic marriage,” and dazzled by the Baron’s familiarity with the intricacies of the Almanach de Gotha. In his society and Mrs. Newell’s, Mrs. Hubbard evidently felt that she had penetrated to the sacred precincts where “the right thing” flourished in its native soil. As for Hermione, her look of happiness had returned, but with an undertint of melancholy, visible perhaps only to Garnett, but to him always hauntingly present. Outwardly she sank back into her passive self, resigned to serve as the brilliant lay-figure on which Mrs. Newell hung the trophies of conquest. Preparations for the wedding were zealously pressed. Mrs. Newell knew the danger of giving people time to think things over, and her fears about her husband being allayed, she began to [87] dread a new attempt at evasion on the part of the bridegroom’s family.
“The sooner it’s over the sounder I shall sleep!” she declared to Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments, indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of safety.
But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her husband’s declaration, might have told him that she always got what she wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown by the way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she bloomed out in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering sense of the ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.
The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented itself punctually at Garnett’s door, and the young man entered it and drove to the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back street, with lean old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of pit-life gardens, black and sunless, between walls bristling with iron spikes. On the narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led by a red-eyed poodle: a little farther on a dishevelled woman sat grinding coffee on the threshold of a
Hermione’s parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye seemed as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there was something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as though he had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last hypothesis Garnett paused—for it became evident to him that Mr. Newell had hired his dress-suit.
Seated at the young man’s side on the satin cushions, he remained silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the network of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only once he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe: “Is this Mrs. Newell’s carriage?”
“I believe so—yes,” Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in defining that lady’s possessions it was impossible not to trespass on those of her friends.
